Textbook whitewashes history

October 29, 2010|By Tamara Dietrich

If Internet research were the standard by which we evaluate textbooks, we could publish Wikipedia entries and call it a curriculum.

Perhaps that's unfairly glib to describe the research technique that author Joy Masoff used for part of her textbook "Our Virginia: Past and Present," which offers this wildly erroneous line: "Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson."

Masoff says she found this tidbit on the Internet; it traces back to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that pushes the equally bogus idea that slavery wasn't a main cause of the Civil War.

It's not Masoff's fault she hit on the tidbit — the Internet is simultaneously a treasure trove and a trash heap of information and ideas.

Her failure was in not determining whether the tidbit was treasure or trash.

Had Masoff dug a bit, for instance, she would have found that Stonewall Jackson died in May 1863, and the Confederate Congress didn't authorize taking "able-bodied negro men" from their owners to form black regiments till March 1865, just 17 days before the war ended.

Scholars do acknowledge that slaves were used as laborers in the Confederate war effort, and some individual slaves even fought to defend their masters.

But even the University of Virginia historian that Masoff claims as another source says she went far beyond supportable research.

"There's no way of knowing that there were thousands," Ervin Jordan told The Washington Post. "And the claim about Jackson is totally false. I don't know where that came from."

Perhaps Masoff found the tidbit too tantalizing to look too closely — after all, she's also written books for kids that are designed to titillate and provoke, like "Oh, Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty" and "Oh, Yikes! History's Grossest Moments." Both of which, ironically enough, would be more fitting forums for the idea that thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks.

In fact, the very idea of slave Johnny Rebs is so nasty, so gross, you wonder why nobody, from Masoff to her publisher to the three elementary schoolteachers who comprised the state's review committee for such books, batted an eye.

It wasn't until a College of William & Mary history professor opened her daughter's copy of "Our Virginia" that the mistake was finally caught.

"This is a factual error of monumental proportions," Carol Sheriff told the Post, "in that it will likely confuse people about the absolute core issue of the war."

Five Ponds Press says it'll omit the sentence in reprints; till then, it's sending out sticker labels to cover it up. A Hampton historian, however, just filed suit to stop the coverup, and form a committee of experts to revise the line to best reflect the history of black Civil War soldiers.

Meanwhile, Gov. Bob McDonnell ordered a full review of the state's textbook adoption process, and every school district that already paid tens of thousands of dollars to buy the book is struggling to make it a teachable moment about parsing fact from fiction, and how not to trust everything you see in print.

Or, as the case may be, on the Internet.

So what did Masoff learn from the experience? Apparently, not much.

"As controversial as it is, I stand by what I write," Masoff said early on. "I am a fairly respected writer."

Then she got petulant: "It's just one sentence. … If the historians had contacted me and asked me to take it out, I would have."

Certainly even fairly respected writers make mistakes. Masoff would've done better to admit she'd been snookered and vow to be more cautious next time.

Instead, her research method is now suspect. Content specialists and historians, like Sheriff, would do well to read through her other history books used in Virginia public schools, like "Chronicle of America: Colonial Times, 1600-1700" and "Chronicle of America: American Revolution, 1700-1800."

For all we know, they may teach that Benedict Arnold was a double agent for the Continental Army and the first Africans arrived on a Princess Cruise ship.

Or they might whitewash the slave trade as the "Atlantic triangular trade" … oh, wait, never mind — that's Texas.